C anadian-born style-warrior Tyler Brûlé launched his latest brainchild this past week, a 242-page magazine of international affairs, culture and design he has christened Monocle .

Canadian-born style-warrior Tyler Brûlé launched his latest brainchild this past week, a 242-page magazine of international affairs, culture and design he has christened Monocle.

The name is as clever and memorable as that of his initial media offspring, the high-concept décor magazine Wallpaper*, which he had dreamed up at the age of 27 and sold to Time-Warner in 1997 for $2.3 million (U.S.). a year after its start-up.

Can the Ryerson University dropout pull another glossy, counter-intuitive rabbit out of the hat?

All week the British papers were having a field day making ironic comments about Monocle's unlikely story mix, and wondering if the magazine will prove to be a triumph of style over content. The Guardian called it a magazine for "departure-lounge divas."

Monocle's glitzy launch party was held at Claridge's, the luxury hotel in London, on Wednesday night. "Tyler brought a Swedish band called the Koop; it was really, really fun," says Ann Marie Gardner, formerly editor of the New York Times' travel magazine, and now chief of Monocle's New York bureau. (Canadian coverage falls under her jurisdiction.) The evening before, there had been a kickoff in Stockholm (Brûlé has a Swedish boyfriend and loves Sweden) and tomorrow another launch party will take place in Tokyo. Already on the stands in Britain, the U.S. and Japan, the magazine – 5,000 copies – will arrive here at the end of this week and sell for $12.50.

Editor-in-chief Brûlé reportedly raised £3.3 million ($7.5 million) from a variety of international sources to finance the ambitious start-up. The first issue has an 18-page cover story, lavishly illustrated with original photos, about the Japanese navy, which has quietly grown into the second largest in the world. Another big story deals with Chinese imperialism in Africa. There are reports on the Sundance Film Festival, and the first story about U.S. director Robert Logevall's film based on Haruki Murakami's short story All God's Children Can Dance.

A piece about a minimalist bachelor pad in Stockholm harkens back to Wallpaper*, as does a story about the Wisconsin-based Russell Moccasin Company, whose handmade shoes are cult objects in Japan. "We will find really interesting stories about bespoke companies that still hand-make things," comments Gardner.

A mass market wine in Germany named Happy Cat makes for a lively business story, along with the tale of an Austrian lighting company with a new technology to manipulate daylight.

"We did a story about (Nicaraguan leader) Daniel Ortega and an interview with the Chilean finance minister and about Canada, a piece about the gold rush for passports now that new border law has gone into effect, and the Nexus card," says Gardner, speaking on her cellphone from the Berlin airport.

The 10-times-a-year magazine, she says, is "a hip version of the Economist, as someone said at the launch party, with culture integrated into it. There is a lot to read and we are definitely interested in Canada. A lot of Canadians work on the magazine."

In addition to Brûlé, who declined to be interviewed by the Star, the Canadians include publisher Pamela Mullinger, who has previously worked with Brûlé as head of fashion advertising on Wallpaper* and as business development director of Winkreative, a Zurich-based design and brand-development company Brûlé owns. Winkreative rebranded Switzerland's national airline and last fall designed the interiors of planes for the new Porter Airlines.

Another member of Brûlé's old Wallpaper team is Richard Spencer Powell, Monocle's creative director. Each issue of Monocle will include a manga comic devised by Powell and drawn in Tokyo, detailing the adventures of the imaginary "Niels Watanabe," and an endpage about what some well-known person (in this case NBC news anchor Ann Curry) would choose as his or her last meal.

In interviews Brûlé has said celebrities are verboten in his magazines ("There are too many real things happening in the world") and he is not interested in stories that originate in a press release.

A visionary, Brûlé has grasped the publishing opportunities of a shrinking world, in which a Toronto resident will speak to someone in Bangalore for computer help, and a couple can fly from London to Lyon for the cost of dinner in a good restaurant. Half of the copies of Monocle he expects to sell in Europe, about 30 percent in North America and the rest in Asia and Australia. Monocle, like Wallpaper* and his failed unisex fashion magazine spruce, operates in the deracinated psychological space opened up by globalization.

The magazine is pitched to people who travel all the time, and may have homes in more than one country, as he does. The magazine industry is watching to see if he can corral this high-income group. He can recoup 60 percent of his publishing costs from advertising, and the rest from sales, he says.

All the international luxury-brand advertisers have bought into the first issue – Audi, Yves St. Laurent, PUMA, Dior, Cartier, Cathay Pacific, Prada. It remains to be seen if they'll stick around. However, to break even, he told the London Observer last week, he needs to sell only 60,000 copies, worldwide.

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